I must say I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the ghosts of both.

Well, exactly, Brian, as I'm sure many of us will have. I gave three points of similarity above to kick off this discussion. I was going to add a fourth opinion though three seemed to be enough for starters. It is this:-

•        It has proved to be difficult for song collectors and academics to come to the body of English language folk song without some prior outline in their minds of what was going on. Let's take Sharp first; in 1903, Sharp visited Marson, who was vicar at the village of Hambridge in Somerset. Whilst they were sat out in the garden, they heard the gardener, whose name was John England, singing The Seeds of Love, his first encounter with an English Folk Song. In 1907 he wrote English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions. Bloody hell, Cecil! That was quick! From absolute beginner to published expert in four years! Here's something that I cut out of The Guardian on Friday 4 May 2007 by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor

The English folksong collector Cecil Sharp was interested in isolating white Britishness. He travelled the country lanes of England seeking out rural workers for their unadulterated traditional material. In their songs he saw a distant reflection of the "merrie England" of myth. Sharp then travelled to America to document the survival of the English and Scottish tradition in the isolated communities of the Appalachian mountains. At the time, one out of every eight Appalachians was black, but Sharp dubbed black Americans "a lower race", recoiled from towns with too high a proportion of them, and concentrated only on those songs he considered pure British folk song.

Ewan MacColl along with friend and fellow communist Bert Lloyd was looking for evidence to support their passionate desire to 'revitalise' the interest in and the enthusiasm of the British working class in what he saw as the traditional culture that was in their best interests. Fred McCormick, in his article Joe Heaney (20.4.2000) at http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/heaney.htm writes:-

Ewan MacColl remained a passionate advocate of working class musical art, arguing that the revitalisation of folksong was essential for the realisation of socialist ideology, and for the psychological desegregation of the human race. Unfortunately, very little of this argument was ever committed to print, * MacColl preferring to propagate his convictions via live and recorded performances and through the training of young singers, whom he and Peggy organised into The Critics Group.

So the pair of them clearly had an agenda. Of the two MacColl's seems the healthier to me. If what I have quoted about Sharp is accurate then there are some worrying things in his intentions. Clearly, however, neither of them came to the study of folk song with an open enquiring mind, forming hypotheses and theories from the raw material they found as a clear minded academic should, but arriving at the subject with some pre-conception of what they were going to find.

* Are you reading this, Jim Carroll? "very little of this argument was ever committed to print" No more arguing with bloody Vic Smith on Mudcat; get that transcription, editing and publishing work done.